


fly by the wings of your creation

by retweet_this



Category: Pod Save America (RPF)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, Character Study
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-21
Updated: 2018-01-21
Packaged: 2019-03-07 13:22:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13435590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/retweet_this/pseuds/retweet_this
Summary: stop me if you’ve heard this one: a boy falls out of the sky.





	fly by the wings of your creation

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: a boy falls out of the sky.

He doesn’t really fall, though – he crashes, hard, down in some abandoned woods in the middle of Massachusetts. In the middle of nowhere.

Things don’t really fall out of the sky in Massachusetts, let alone things that look like human boys (and not even a boy yet, a baby, small and innocent and. ignorant) in a sleek and futuristic pod that burns the soil around it when it crashes.

He wakes up and he cries. He’s in the woods, he’s in the middle of nowhere, he’s all alone. There is such a slim chance that anyone could find him.

Someone finds him.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jon gets glasses when he’s five years old.

He’s supposed to be starting preschool, but his mother doesn’t think he should. There’s something about her son, she thinks, something in the way he got frustrated, something in the way he’d sometimes just break down into tears, something in the way he’d just curl up and wish the world away.

Sometimes Jon can read, sometimes he can’t, so his father decides to get his eyes checked. Maybe there’s something there that could explain, well something.

Unfortunately for him, there’s nothing there that explains anything.

Jon sees the color drain from his dad’s face and his heart beats faster, everything gets so loud, he feels like he’s going to explode, and it takes a couple of breathing exercises from the doctor and a few comforting pats on the back from his dad for him to just. breathe normally.

They leave the office, Jon with a pair of glasses that make him look a little too nerdy at first but he grows into them (in every sense of the word), and his dad with a list of child specialists, discreet and qualified, who could maybe help with whatever’s happening to his son.

(It takes him a while to figure out that nothing’s happening – something’s already happened, years ago, when he found a child outside of a small camping site and took him home.)

Jon’s mother things he looks smart in his glasses, and Jon beams at her with pride.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It takes about a month into classes for Jon to decide that college isn’t really the right place for him. Everything is so loud, so much, there’s never really a moment for him to take a step back and just sort of. breathe.

(That’s not really the whole problem.)

The other kids are, well, other kids. Some are nice, some are mean, some just don’t care, that’s generally how life goes and all, but it just doesn’t.

Everyone’s ambitious. Everyone’s aiming for something. Jon is just sort of. there.

“I don’t know,” he mumbles vaguely, whenever his parents call and ask him how he’s fitting in. “I don’t know, it’s just sort of… I don’t know how to explain it.”

“You’ll get there,” his mom promises. “It takes some time – it took plenty of time for your father to figure out what he wanted to do with his life, but he did it in the end and I’m sure you can too.”

He says fine, he says okay, he says thanks, but he doesn’t say that’s not the real problem he has. He doesn’t say, there’s something inside of him that just isn’t clicking, as hard as he tries. He doesn’t say that there’s a whole half of him that seems to be missing and he doesn’t know what to do to fill it.

College isn’t right for him, but he makes it work. Community service, though – that’s right for him. That sort of fits the hole he has in him, but it doesn’t. it doesn’t feel right.

It doesn’t go away when he volunteers, it doesn’t go away when he graduates, it doesn’t go away when he works for Kerry, it barely goes away when he’s caught up in writing, but it just.

It never goes away.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Obama takes his breath away, when Jon realizes what he could do with him. They sit in the Senate dining room, together, on the first day of his term, and Jon feels like he’s.

He doesn’t know what he feels like yet. But there’s definitely some sort of feeling there. He feels breathless. Most of the conversation he does on autopilot, giving the type of lines he’d give anyone he knows – friends, strangers – about family, sports, whatever small-talk topic they’re on.

“What’s your theory on speechwriting?” Obama asks him.

Jon doesn’t know, not at first, but it comes to him, slowly. “A speech can broaden the circle of people who care about this stuff,” he says. His voice sounds level but he doesn’t feel like he’s on any sort of level. He feels out of it.

“How do you say to the average person that's been hurting: ‘I hear you. I'm there. Even though you've been so disappointed and cynical about politics in the past, and with good reason, we can move in the right direction. Just give me a chance.’”

There’s a long beat of silence, then Obama smiles. “I think this is going to work.”

For the first time in a long time, Jon feels. something. He smiles.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The thing about Lovett is that he’s not quiet. There’s no part of him that’s silent or quiet or still for even a moment. He’s always doing something, mumbling to himself or pacing or scribbling something down on a spare piece of paper. It’s like he’s vibrating at a frequency discernable to everyone else but himself and if he moves fast enough, he can do something crazy. There’s never a dull moment, not when Jon can hear him from anywhere in the West Wing.

Tommy is different than Lovett, but he’s more like the friends Jon made back in college, back during the time of his life where he didn’t quite know what was missing from him (he still doesn’t). He’s always down for a drink, always down to have some rest and relaxation, it’s just so easy to talk to him and just. breathe.

And Emily is.

Well, she’s Emily. She’s amazing. He’s in love.

(There’s still something missing.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In 2012, Jon Favreau learns he’s not human.

In 2012, Jon collapses onto the couch of his home, the home he grew up in, on the planet he wasn’t born on, and the parents who raised him sit beside him and hold his hands as they tell him the truth.

In 2012, Jon sees the spot where he landed, sees the ruins of the spaceship that once held a small and scared baby, the spot where his story could’ve ended but really, just began.

In 2012, Jon is handed tickets to a boat that will take him to Antarctica, where his dad says he’ll find something that belongs to him.

In 2012, Jon tells Obama he’s leaving the White House. Obama doesn’t ask where he’s going, neither do his friends, but they make sure he stays in touch.

(In 2012, he tells Emily he needs to go find something, something that could help him figure out who he is. He tells her she doesn’t have to wait for him. She says she will.)

In 2012, Jon learns he doesn’t get cold. Not really.

In 2013, Jon finds something. Jon finds out who he is.

In 2013, Jon learns he can fly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In 2015, Jon Favreau returns to the face of the planet. He restarts his social media accounts, posts pictures on Instagram of some dog no one’s seen before, and he’s moved in with his girlfriend.

“Where the fuck have you been?” Lovett asks when he calls him.

Jon smiles and laughs, “Hello to you too,” and he doesn’t answer the question. No one gets the answer, not even Emily (and certainly not Lovett, even when he moves in next door and tries to divine whatever they’re hiding).

It’s like this – Jon knows who he is now. He knows what’s been missing this whole time, he knows who he is and where he came from but.

He doesn’t really know anything.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One day, Dan calls. He forgets to say hi. “Hey, how much do you miss politics?”

Jon sits up and shrugs. “I… I don’t know. A bit? A lot?”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

As it turns out, he did.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Crooked Media is mostly the brainchild of Tommy and Lovett. They rope Jon and Dan in because it wouldn’t be any fun without them but as a whole, it’s theirs. It’s their way of fighting back.

“Come on,” Lovett huffs when he’s pitching the concept (as though he thinks Jon would say no to anything his friends want to do with him), “don’t you want to fight back somehow? Don’t you want people to air their grievances and be able to _do_ something instead of sit around and complain about it?”

“Like we’re going to be doing two times a week?” Jon jokes, and laughs when Lovett rolls his eyes and pushes his arm.

Jon says yes, of course he does, but.

But something about him feels empty again.

Somewhere in the icy tundra, there’s a spaceship. And in that spaceship, there’s a message from his father – his birthfather, the one who sent him to this planet all those years ago – and he tells his son that he’ll do great things, here on this planet.

There are so many incredible things Jon can do, there’s no way the only way he can make a difference is starting a political podcast.

He could do something. He just. doesn’t know what.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

During the next pod recoding, Lovett makes a joke and everyone laughs and for a second, Jon forgets to be depressed. Everyone does.

He sees something on his phone about President-elect Trump and then everything comes back down again.

“I guess we should’ve been more pessimistic, huh?” Jon sighs, not for the first time and probably not the last.

Dan shakes his head. “No, don’t be like that,” he says. He nudges his arm. “We need some optimistic fools out there, especially now.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jon sees the news alert on his phone and he barely has time to process it when he hears Lovett turn on the TV in his home. Jon does the same and they watch, at the same time, in different places, the same broadcast as the rest of America.

It’s. it’s. Jon doesn’t even know what to say, what to think. It’s unbelievable, it’s just like a movie or like a story or like some fiction but there it is, happening right in front of him.

Lovett calls him right when the anchor starts talking again – it’s cable news on a weekend, who knew who was on? – and Jon picks up immediately. There’s a long pause and then, “Did… did that just happen?”

“You mean did a guy just try to shoot up a pizza place in DC and some other guy knocked him out, broke his gun, and ran?” Jon replies. He lets out a shaky breath. “Yeah, I think that actually happened.”

The reasonings of the shooter come out pretty quickly and the whole “Pizzagate” mess is uncovered but the other guy. The man in black. No one knows who he is.

“Alt-righters think he’s a Clinton stooge sent there to stop them from uncovering the true underground child sex ring,” Tommy says after a short foray into the world of Reddit.

“How quaint,” Lovett deadpans. He drains his Diet Coke and tries tossing the can into the garbage, but it hits the rim and falls right beside it. Jon ends up having to throw it away anyway, he gives Pundit a little pat on the head as he walks by, everything goes back to business as usual.

It takes a while for everyone to realize that the guy – the vigilante guy, the guy who’s going around and saving lives – he’s not going anywhere.

Someone links Jon to an article about “the Dark Knight of D.C.” and he refuses to read it just yet.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_Check Twitter_ , Lovett sends in the group chat, and Jon has to rub his eyes and make his brain work again before he can process the tweets he’s reading, the pictures he’s seeing, the logical conclusions he’s coming to because of them, he’s not sure if it’s actually happening.

He calls Lovett. “What did I just see?”

“Oh, you saw the video?” Lovett asks. He sounds oddly stable, like either he hasn’t yet come to terms with whatever he saw or he has and he’s accepted it fully.

“I didn’t see a video,” Jon replies, slowly. His heart isn’t beating faster but if it could, oh it would, it really would. “Lovett –”

“Oh, I’ll send it in the chat,” Lovett says. There’s the sound of some shifting, he must be in bed too, even though he’s probably been awake for hours, “Half of Twitter is trying to prove it’s fake while the other half is proving it’s real and, really, a couple more videos have been posted right after that one so I’m kinda thinking that –”

“Lovett, I…”

“– it’s kind of impossible to CGI _that_ fast, especially with something like a bullet bouncing off a bracelet –”

“Lovett…”

“– and there’s no way that the Women’s March people managed to coordinate everyone’s responses and pictures so they’d exactly match up with what happened –”

“Lovett –”

“– you can see it in their faces when they look at her, this is –”

“ _Lovett._ ”

“Yes?”

Jon takes a deep breath. He wipes his face with his free hand. “Lovett,” he says again, “what did I just watch?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Lovett replies, his self-satisfied smirk evident in his tone. He sounds unbearably pleased, unbearably excited. He lets out a long breath. “That was a _superhero_.”

It takes a couple of days for the name to settle but, well, it’s a good one, it fits: Wonder Woman. A couple dozen thinkpieces come out within the first few days debating whether the debacle itself even happened but when she stops a robbery somewhere on Long Island, then it’s settled.

The Dark Knight and Wonder Woman – the first superheroes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Outside of New York and D.C. and Twitter, no one really talks about them. Sometimes there’s a snippet on TV about a masked man stopping a murderer or a woman in gold saving someone from a burning building, things like that, but nothing in the public discourse yet.

“Are we not going to talk about it?” Tommy asks during a meeting in early February.

“Talk about what?” Lovett asks, chuckling when Tommy throws a look his way. “Oh, come on, why would we talk about it? It’s, what’s that bullshit word, a nothing-burger.”

Tommy rolls his eyes. “Oh yeah, a bunch of people going around and fighting crime or whatever is a nothing-burger, all right, let’s just stick to politics.”

Jon shifts, a little uncomfortably, but neither of them notice, they’re too busy glaring at each other. Lovett lets out a long sigh, “Come on, Tommy, we got some more important issues to deal with, like DACA and Obamacare.” He shrugs. “I mean, talking about heroes isn’t gonna do anything now, is it?”

Tommy doesn’t respond immediately, just sighs under his breath and nods, “Yeah, fine, let’s go back to our regularly scheduled program,” but Jon doesn’t miss what he mumbled.

_We don’t know if they’re heroes._

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are a lot of crimes in Los Angeles. Not necessarily murders, but crimes where people get hurt.

If Jon isn’t careful, he’ll sometimes hear crying in the middle of the night. And then he’ll sometimes do something incredibly stupid.

It doesn’t go beyond blurry Twitter pictures, rumors of a man or several men out in the night who are impervious to bullets, who save people in the middle of the night.

Jon’s become a local cryptid. He feels he can do something more.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

They’re in New York, he and Dan, for a late-night show. Crooked Media is still new, they’re still gaining popularity, people want to know what they’re about. Dan seems pretty excited about it, Jon is too, everything seems to be going well.

Jon goes out for a late walk and someone tries shooting him.

It’s very sudden – he’s walking and all of a sudden someone’s pulling him into an alleyway and before Jon can even blink, he hears the gun go off. The bullets pierce through his clothes and land on the ground with quiet, deafening tumbles. The man shooting him doesn’t seem to notice, he’s still, well, shooting him, so Jon does what he thinks is right.

He punches him, and the guy lands on the floor. And then, somewhere behind him, a woman says, “Well, I guess I didn’t need to intervene, huh?”

Jon doesn’t need to turn his head to see who it is, he already knows, but he looks her way anyway. And there, like a beacon in the night, in all her glory, is Wonder Woman. His mouth falls open and he gapes at her.

She laughs and shakes her head. “Yes, it’s me,” she hums. “But, maybe I should be standing in awe of you.”

It takes Jon a few seconds to realize she’s speaking, and he fumbles a bit before he can respond. “What – what do you mean?”

“You were shot point-blank, right in the chest, and you’re still standing.” She shrugs and crosses her arms. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were the superhero between the two of us.”

Jon swallows, hard. He takes a few moments to figure out what he wants to say. “I don’t know how,” he finally admits. His voice is quiet, even for him, but she hears him.

Her gaze softens for a moment and there’s a small, sympathetic smile on her face. “Well,” she says, “what makes you think I did?” And without another word, she winks and turns around and then she’s. gone.

That chance meeting changes everything for Jon. His hands are eerily still when he gets back to his hotel room and stares at them. The holes on his shirt are singed at the edges. He can never wear it again.

Somewhere in the frozen tundra, there’s a spaceship with clothes that are impervious to bullets. Clothes that look strange to humans, but ordinary to people like him.

The next time Emily is away for the weekend, Jon goes and gets them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A man pulls a knife on a woman in a dark alleyway. Jon stops him. The woman doesn’t have time to thank him before he’s up in the air again but he felt it, the relief and the sincerity and everything else she felt in that short moment where her life went from in danger to not.

It was a very short moment, but in that short moment, Jon felt. He felt.

Whatever was missing in him before, he didn’t feel it missing anymore. He felt. Full.

He does in search of the feeling again, and he finds it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s right after his first outing that LA Twitter gives him a nickname. Lovett posts it in the Slack with a couple dozen exclamation points and no one really knows how to respond.

A blurry picture of a man hovering feet above the ground while someone shoots at him. The only thing clear is the giant, stark, red “S” on his shirt.

_Look at Superman!!!_ the tweet reads.

“Superman,” Jon repeats. “I like the sound of that.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 “Bedtime already?” Emily jokes when she sees Jon yawning as he gets up halfway through a movie. It’s about 8:45. He’s got about fifteen minutes to make her think he’s asleep before he has to go.

“You know me, early to bed, early to rise.” He bends down and kisses her and her hand lingers a little against his cheek as they part.

He doesn’t want to ask, he knows the answer, but he asks anyway. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” she says, at first, but it’s so hard for her to keep it in and she lets it slip out anyway. “I feel like we don’t spend enough time together, you know?”

Jon wishes he didn’t. He takes her hand and squeezes it tightly. “We spend time together,” he tries to sound confident and yet it still ends up sounding like a feeble excuse. He tries again. “Maybe we can have a nice weekend vacation sometime soon?”

It’s highly unlikely that it’ll happen, but she doesn’t need to know that just this moment. He can work out a plan. He can figure something out. For her.

Emily smiles and kisses the back of his fingers. “We’ll figure it out in the morning,” she hums. “Now go, you need your beauty rest.”

He’s thinking about her smile while he’s flying above the city, scanning the crowds and looking for danger (there’s always danger). He thinks about her a lot.

It gets harder and harder to leave each night.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 “We should do an episode on Superman,” Lovett decides, apropos nothing. That’s not really news, though, since Jon really can’t keep up with whatever jumps of logic Lovett makes. He doesn’t really question it anymore.

Tommy still does, sometimes. “Superman,” he repeats. “We didn’t say anything about any of the other guys and now you wanna say something about this one?”

Lovett shrugs. “Come on, now, you wanted to talk about superheroes before but now, all of a sudden, when there’s one in our city, when they’re all over the news, you’re over them?” His brow furrows further when Tommy scoffs and he sits up, frowning in his direction. “What’s that for?”

“I don’t know,” Tommy says, “I guess I just wouldn’t call them superheroes, you know?”

“Oh really?” Lovett’s scooting his chair over to Tommy’s desk now, lips press together in a thin line when he’s not talking. “You wouldn’t call a woman who can pretty much fly and a man who threw a car at someone ‘superheroes’?”

“Well, super, yeah,” Tommy concedes, slowly. “but I’m not so sure about the hero part, you know? I mean, there’s just a system to these things and these, well, vigilantes aren’t really the best way to correct the system.”

Lovett lets out a dramatic groan as he rolls his eyes. “Of _course_ you’d call them vigilantes. Should’ve figured from the Wonder Woman discourse.”

“It’s not the most inaccurate term,” Tommy counters. “Come on, the Republicans have a point when they say –”

“And I’m going to stop you right there. Jon,” they both turn their heads over to him and Jon pulls the headphones out of his ears (not that he was listening to anything, but, well).

“Yeah?” he asks, blinking for good measure.

“Would you rather side with the guys who _started_ the whole Pizzagate nonsense, or the guys who went in and stopped it from becoming a shootout?”

“Hey, that’s a leading question,” Tommy huffs and Lovett tries shutting him up by repeatedly swatting his arms and face away.

“He’s got a point,” Jon chuckles lightly, shaking his head a little. He clears his throat. “But you guys know I don’t like inserting myself into this kind of stuff.”

“Yeah, yeah,” they grumble, rolling their eyes, slightly smiling, and it’s only when Jon has his headphones back in for a good couple of moments that Lovett mumbles, “you know he’s on my side, right?”

Tommy sighs, but not in an angry way, more of a resigned, matter-of-fact way. He nods. “Yeah,” he says. “I think out of any of us, Jon is the one who wants to believe in heroes.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Instead of an episode on Superman, they do a segment on the Trump administration’s official stance on superheroes.

“Months after the Dark Knight stopped the Pizzagate shooting,” Jon starts, “Trump has finally tweeted about it. And, well, it’s exactly what we all expected.”

Lovett nods and leans his arm on the table. “He just sat in his tweeting chair, pulled out his phone and just – pressed the autocomplete button and then just sent it out, just like that.” He shakes his head, briefly chuckling. “I mean, it’s incoherent. It’s completely incoherent.”

“It’s like they threw a bunch of talking points at him and he sort of mashed them together and put out a statement,” Tommy sighs. He shakes his head disapprovingly.

“Honestly,” Lovett says, “I’m okay with the Dark Knight and Wonder Woman teaming up to take over the country.”

“Really?” Jon exaggerates the word and he leans back a little, just to take him in. “Why not Superman?” he asks. “Is he not up to par with, uh, your standards?”

Lovett rolls his eyes, letting out a slight huff as he defends himself. “Superman is _very_ up to my standards, which is why he should remain in LA where I can keep a closer eye on him.”

“A closer eye,” Jon repeats, just as Tommy says, “You want him to rescue you one day so you can somehow make him fall in love with you.”

“Don’t out me like that, Tommy.”

They all laugh, the topic changes, Jon’s heart is still beating a little faster.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He’s not sleeping much anymore. It’s a lot of micro-naps and coffee and just splashing his face with water whenever he gets the chance.

“Up all night, huh?” Tommy jokes one time when he sees him yawning before a livestream. Jon just chuckles sheepishly.

“Not getting your beauty sleep, huh?” Lovett says, another time, and he brings him a can of Diet Coke to his desk. Jon thanks him and drains the whole thing in a few gulps.

It’s a struggle every night to leave Emily’s side, to untangle himself from her arms and watch her press herself against his pillow as he gets ready to leave.

“Take care of her,” he whispers to Leo, as he does every night, rubbing the top of his head and smiling when he gives a soft bark.

It’s hard, it’s so hard, going out each night like this. But it’s good. He’s doing the right thing. He’s stopping rapists and murderers and robbers and thieves, he’s stopping the scum of society from hurting the innocent.

People are genuinely grateful when they see him in the sky. They need him.

It’s so hard to keep doing this, but he can do it.

He has to.

**Author's Note:**

> there's a 90% chance i will forget to post chapter 2


End file.
